ASSIST
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Mission Statement
ASSIST is registered under Indian Societies Registration Act XXI of 1860. It is a non-profit, secular voluntary organisation working for the upliftment of rural downtrodden. Its registration number is 229 dated 27th December 1985. “ASSIST” is also registered with Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India. ASSIST is a micro-level intermediary organisation working for the development of disinherited groups in the dry-land region of Prakasam, Guntur, Krishna and Ranga Reddy Districts. It was initiated by a group of young and experienced professionals in 1985. With the primary objective of making communities as viable units for their development, a number of developmental activities were formulated and were executed so far with the partnership of respective communities. Being well appreciated the need for people’s participation at every stage of project planning and execution, prior importance was given for the active involvement of target group in realising their needs.
About This Cause
The ultimate vision of ASSIST is visualising an ideal society. All people of faith need to focus their attention first on the liberation of the victims of an unjust society, a total liberation which is personal and social, economic and political. At the same time, they need to be building a new society. In the building of a new society, we need: • to improve our communication, • to learn to listen, • to express our insights, • to dialogue together our needs, • to analyse the causes of our problems, and • to plan and act together in teams, organisations and movements. Both theory and well cited examples give us a hope that “there is a possibility of building a new type of socialism based on community and not on bureaucracy”. The guiding principles of the organisation are: • The “COMMUNITY” is the centre of development and therefore the members of the community should be first of all organised to mutually respect and feel the need for one another (cohesive community). • In the second stage, the community “PARTICIPATE” in analysing the micro and macro realities and begin a process of planning to intervene in different stages of development. • The third stage is the one where the community begins “A PROCESS OF ACTION” for its own betterment. Part of this process is also the realisation of the need for inter-linking with neighbouring communities around common causes. This is also the stage where the economy of the community is made more stable. • The fourth and last stage is the one where the community is able to “SUSTAIN ITS UNITY AND VALUE SYSTEM” and carry forward the work. This stage should enable the community to achieve self-reliance with strong unity and leadership, and a value system wherein resources are shared among the members of the community and concern for fellow human beings is felt very much. Independence must begin at the bottom. Thus every village will be republic or panchayat, having full powers. It follows, therefore, that every village has to be self-sustained and capable of managing its affairs even in the extent of defending itself against the whole world. - Mahatma Gandhi GENESIS: With a small beginning in the years 1985-86, the organisation has grown to the level of one of the well-known voluntary initiatives in the State of Andhra Pradesh. The unique feature of the organisation has been developing strategies periodically, through its experience, in order to achieve its over-all objective: “Making the community a viable unit for its own development”. The founders had only the commitment and unflinching faith inherited from “Village Reconstruction Organisation” (VRO) founded by Prof. Michael Anthony Windey, a Belgian Jesuit, and the experience gained in working together as a team, organising the communities to invest for the success of ASSIST. These human investments paid off and ASSIST has within a short period of 23 years made indelible marks in the history of voluntarism in Andhra Pradesh. It has been an uphill task for ASSIST, confronting and surmounting the social, economic and political realities within which the NGO sector is operating. However given these limitations, ASSIST has been endeavouring to explore various possibilities of becoming more relevant to the needs of the disadvantaged poor in Prakasam and Guntur Districts where the Organisation works. Since its inception, the organisation has been trying to relate its work to the aims and objectives enunciated in its foundation, and at the same time to read the signs of the times and respond to emerging challenges. As such the Organisation has evolved responding to the emerging trends and needs, while relating to its the original aims, objectives and philosophy. The key to development impact is to generate a movement from the micro intervention first at the village level followed by regional level and then broader level. As such the strategy developed by ASSIST has been to begin with the identified target community and involve the whole village. The villages are linked into an area, the areas are linked at the broader level of the district. As such the communities are horizontally linked on account of micro level action while the villages are linked vertically in terms of awareness and macro response. The methodology is focussed on integrating people’s participation with increasing intensity from micro to the broader level. ASSIST started its involvement with the issue of child labour. Gradually the involvement broadened to address more fundamental problems in society which have been the root causes of the problem of child labour. Hence, even though starting with a child labour rehabilitation programme, the process entailed the generation of people’s movements on some issues like social housing, sanitation, drinking water, community health, savings, credit, income generation, self-reliance and ecology encompassing the whole community, area and district. In all these target groups the poorest of the poor such as artisans, agricultural labourers, small and marginal farmers and migratory workers have been a natural option for ASSIST’s intervention. The designing of programmes has focused on the most vulnerable category of society i.e. women and children. As such at operational level some (vulnerable) group based movements have also emerged like village leadership movement, women’s movement and child care movement. The pace and intensity of these movements varies from one to the other because they have been emanating at different points of time in relation to micro interventions. Over the years, ASSIST has increasingly become sensitive to vulnerable target groups, particularly scheduled castes, scheduled tribes, and fishermen and has been making efforts to study the problems of these categories and enable them to come out of their state of poverty. ASSIST has been responding in a scientific manner to the requests emerging from the new communities to intervene and address their problems. Drawing from the fund of experience gained in the last decade, ASSIST has evolved the following strategy to attain sustainable development in a community. The first step in the strategy is to examine whether the new area to be taken for developmental work has suffered from disparity in terms of social, political, economical and cultural aspects. These regions are prioritised on the basis of points for each aspect of disparity. Having selected the areas scoring the highest points of disparity, the villages in that area are again prioritised using the same scoring. The villages which have scored the highest points of disparity are selected as target villages. In these villages, the poorest of the poor are identified through a village survey. From this survey, the target group is selected in the particular community for our intervention. Once the particular target community(s) is identified in a village, an intensive base-line survey is conducted to understand the problems prevailing in the community. The survey itself is done in a participatory manner so that the people are involved in collecting the data and in understanding the causes of their underdevelopment. After the survey, the problems are identified by conceptualising the data and presented to the community along with possible solutions. Then a project is presented for support to begin the process of social transformation in the community. PROCESS OF EMPOWERMENT: The Mahatma’s approach to the question of development was very practical and pragmatic. He made a very accurate assessment of the socio-economic and political ethos of the country and formulated the pro-village, pro-agriculture and pro-people’s power strategy for achieving development. This philosophy motivated the founders of ASSIST to adopt an ideology of empowerment of the poor through creation of people’s organisations. As such, right from the beginning of its involvement, ASSIST has been working with the principles that people should make the programmes on their own and ASSIST should only be a facilitator. They should not work for the people but must work with the people. One day or the other ASSIST would have to leave the place where they are working after forming, activating and strengthening the local people’s organisations. It is in this context, after struggling for the last two decades, that ASSIST is able to say with a fair degree of confidence that they have achieved the qualitative dimension of empowering the poor in their area of operation. This empowerment of the poor has taken place through the emergence of self-sustaining people’s organisations at the grass-root level. The leadership qualities and the management abilities of people’s organisations have been indelibly inscribed in the minds of the sangham leaders. They have been motivated, trained in all the aspects and prepared to take up the total responsibilities of the activities which the voluntary organisation has initiated. Most important element taken care of is the development of community-based monitoring systems to eventually ensure that the systems established are properly followed and the impact is clearly visible. Accordingly, community leaders are sufficiently trained in this aspect and systems are developed and followed to ensure the sustainable development process in these communities. OPERATIONAL AREA: ASSIST, at present, is engaged in the comprehensive development of 209 villages spread over both the States of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana having phased out from over 150 villages so far following self-help approach through a variety of educational, economic, cultural and social related programmes. The programmes have included a variety of educational programmes ranging from environmental improvements to economic development with continuous training built into all the phases. However, ASSIST works with the caution that an appropriate solution arrived to overcome a particular problem in one village may not be appropriate in another village. As such, the strategy and intervention have to be different form one village to another while the process to be followed is unique.